Monday, June 13, 2011

Lollygagging.

I am still taking my sweet time on those Coastal Hoodie sleeves! Luckily I did manage to get one done last night...including all of the ends woven in. It was definitely a pain, but I really love the stripes and the reverse stockinette and there were no easy shortcuts. As soon as I finish this post, it is back to the mines for me.

So I have been dyeing more yarn while avoiding the sleeves. This time I used the leftovers from "B♥MB." I had poured the leftover dye into a mason jar, since after sprinkling the dye powder over the yarn and then spraying it with water there was quite a bit leftover...about 700mL. I used 200gm of Soft Silk yarn, a single ply 50/50 silk/merino blend. For this dye job I used an immersion technique, also called kettle dyeing...my old 10qt turkey roaster came in handy for this.

I filled the roaster most of the way with water and added the leftover dye then turned on the heat. Once it was steaming, after about 20 min, I added the citric acid. It was already looking pretty neat, since the gray and black dyes took up much quicker that the fuchsia. After the dye bath was exhausted, the yarn was pink with some grayish areas.

I decided to darken it up a bit since I already had a commercial yarn that was pretty close in color and texture (Malabrigo Silky Merino in Madre Perla). I used a mixture of blue and purple to deepen the current color and since the water was already hot and acidic...it struck quickly and a little mottled. That was exactly what I was hoping for! Here are some shots of the yarn:

After the leftover dye was exhausted...before the blue/purple overdye.

4 comments:

I did find the book helpful...a lot of techniques are similar, it seems every dyer does something like kettle dyeing or hand painting in a slightly different way. I love gathering a ton of information and figuring out what will work best for me.